Strongest football nations by Elo Ratings

Strongest football nations by Elo Ratings

The following is a list of national football teams ranked by their average Elo score from January 1, 1970 to July 1, 2010. The averages are calculated from the scores on the World Football Elo Ratings web site. As the Elo scores reflect the previous successes of a team, the list probably displays the relative strengths of national teams since the mid to late 1960s. Before this time intercontinental play was fairly limited and many nations in Africa, North America, and Asia had played too few games yet to create a representative Elo score. Strong “short-lived” or young countries like East Germany and Croatia will not appear in this list, but can in the tables below showing the top teams per decade.

Strongest teams per decade

The table below shows the teams with the best average Elo score per decade (Jan 1 19X0 – Dec 31 19X9). Again, because the scores reflect past achievements, the averages are representative of the teams’ strengths for a decade starting and ending sometimes a few years earlier.